Football
his story.asp?storycode=414432 eloquently describes College Football today.
“When it comes to football, universities have hearty appetites, no matter their academic level. One hundred years ago, Yale University perfected a way of tackling that breaks your nose; students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology once reprogrammed Harvard University’s football scoreboard during the game; Harvard students like to yell: “Beat us now, work for us later!” When Robert Hass, the former US Poet Laureate, met with small-town business leaders, he found that they could all name the top local football players, but didn’t know the top students.”
As a lover of basketball who never really followed college sports, I’ve been a bit confused about the high prioritization of sports. I’ve been unable to identify to the visceral reactions people hold when Michigan loses to Ohio State.
The article suggests that sports make it easier to tell which school is better. “How to compare Michigan’s well-regarded master’s of fine arts in creative writing with the University of Southern California’s new PhD in the subject? A see-saw shelf of faculty books? Sport simplifies things: let the Wolverines and Trojans duke it out in the Rose Bowl.”
The author compares it to the superficiality of the sixties, but notes that at the same time it’s hard to place a value judgment because it’s so economically productive. “Nixon called the idea “a cult of escapism” – which can reasonably be said of college sports as well. But American universities are banking – in every sense – on the social passion that sports can create: to join a project greater than ourselves.”
How does a University reconcile being a world class institution and having it’s highest paid employee a football coach? Does the U even have to? It might say that it is simply responding to a demand. The U is a world-class education–how does it reconcile the education/for profit dichotomy?
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